In the high volume manufacture of lenses for eyeglasses and other products, storage racks are necessary for compact storage of the lenses prior to their final assembly to the product. A large number of lenses may be stored in racks for simultaneous cleaning via ultrasound or cleaning solvents. An "open" rack is employed for this purpose, whereupon the lenses are air dried prior to the next assembly step.
Prior art lens racks are often customized for a specific lens shape and size. As a result, a number of different customized lens racks designs are necessary to store a variety of lens types.
The cost of manufacturing these customized racks is generally substantially higher than the cost of manufacturing a single, adjustable lens rack design that can accommodate a wide variety of lens shapes and sizes. Thus, adjustable lens racks have been developed in the prior art to reduce cost and also for logistical simplicity. Many of these adjustable racks have been found to be overly complex, user-unfriendly, and unreliable.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide an adjustable lens rack that overcomes the above disadvantages of prior art lens racks.
It is another object of the present invention to provide an adjustable lens rack which can simultaneously store a number of lenses of diverse shapes and sizes.